Debitum Obedientie : Heloise and Abelard on Governance at the Paraclete

Abstract

Governance was a fundamental issue of monastic life and of the normative texts that shaped it. The letters of Heloise and Abelard on the monastic life, and the Institutiones Nostrae written by Heloise, or perhaps under her guidance, explore (among other things) the problem of governance for nunneries. Abelard's recommendation that monks should manage both the spiritual and mundane governance of an enclosed women's community was neutralized by Heloise's formulation of the Institutiones Nostrae (a very concise expression of the apostolic lifestyle of the Paraclete) in which she clearly located authority in the abbess.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.